Monday, March 23, 2015

This follow-up to a previous blog entry reflects the collective reminiscing of experiences that one or more of the contributors have had during the duration of their graduate student journey.

Does
this graduate school process have to be so destructive (see cheese grater in previous posting)? After watching the
easily digestible documentary film Happy, which oversimplifies topics but is still worth watching, it
became painfully clear to me (author SK) that my dissertation process and the
culture of academia often does not provide me with much of the following
well-documented sources of life satisfaction:

Connection and Community. Long
days in academic rabbit holes chasing after intangible concepts can get in the
way of feeling like our research connects to what matters to people. In
contrast to working as part of a team, much of the dissertation process tends
not to be conducive to strengthening connections to people on a day-to-day
basis.

Exercise. We remain uncertain if a treadmill desk is
worth the investment!

Compassion. Weeks and months of research and writing can make us feel disconnected from the concerns
of others. Sometimes compassion is modeled in grad school, often in times of
crisis. I (author SK) have struggled to be compassionate with myself since I’ve
felt behind in my dissertation progress for years.

Cooperation.
The majority of our thesis or dissertation time is spent conducting independent
research rather than working with others towards a shared goal.

Mindfulness. Non-judgmental
focus is essential to mindfulness. We spend considerable time honing our
abilities to be critical of our own thinking and writing and that of others. I
(SK) have run into trouble in knowing when to turn off or tone down my critical
thinking so I can be more caring rather than a critical, skeptical,
judging scientist.

Gratitude. Expressions
of gratitude for academic research tend not to be common. Sure, seeing that our
work is cited via Google scholar is a little ego boost, but it’s not that
common to get in-person feedback on the end products of all this work,
specifically publications. On the darker days, it’s hard to feel gratitude for
a process that can feel so isolating.

Self-improvement. As
grad students, we tend to invest effort in academic self-improvement at the
cost of not putting time into other dimensions of personal growth.

Flow is associated with
achieving the right balance of competence and challenge. We have tended to feel
incompetent the majority of the time because we’re constantly trying to learn,
which means we often don’t know what we’re doing.

Living according tointrinsic values, which are linked to
concern for others and the environment, kindness, understanding, appreciation,
tolerance and protection of people and nature. Ideally, our research can be
framed with these values, but the day-to-day work often feels disconnected from
these values.

Often staring down a list of all the things we need to do for balance can end up like this (from this site)….

… or this!

So how can we include more of these basic things into our everyday lives? How can we avoid collapse and reduce anxiety and suffering? How can we make this endurance contest feel less like an ego cheese grater and more like a quest for something important? How can we ensure that this PhD (or MSc or MA) feels more fun, provides us with more satisfaction and more of those basic ingredients of happiness?

How can we re-think and redesign the day-to-day experience of this educational process and other dimensions of our lifestyles to experience more of these sources of satisfaction? Below is a compilation of what has helped us and others in our lab group feel better about how we’re spending our time.

Collaborations

Graduate school too often feels like a solo mission. Some of us frequently feel like we’re too extroverted to be good academics. Days on end of dissertation writing make us lonely, especially when we feel like we’re not very good at it. Working with RAs and doing lab projects helps increase our feelings of connectedness and confidence that someone else besides our advisers and committees care about the work we do. We feel more connected when collaborating with non-academic partners, even though these collaborations are not always recognized in an academic setting.

Conferences

Conferences remind us there a lot of people who care about the issues that interest us. They’re good for networking and learning even though they can also feel tangential if dissertation/thesis deadlines are tight.

Basic biology

It’s easy to forget that sleeping, eating well and regular exercise can work wonders. These basics help moderate cortisol and stress hormones, which, if elevated for prolonged periods, make us feel cruddy and age faster.

Affirm the achievements, however small

I (author SK) keep a file with emails from people who have expressed interest in and gratitude for past work that I’ve done.

Most of us have a to-do list. When we check something off, we cut and paste it to the bottom section to remind ourselves that we have been productive.

The longer we’re in grad school, the more we realize we don’t know. We have to remind ourselves that we know way more than we did when we started this process.

Practicing MindfulnessBuddhists are onto something profound. We dabble in meditation and read books on the topic. Practicing mindfulness can help us let go of negative thoughts, reduce feelings of being overwhelmed and focus on the task at hand.

We can be more
productive when we plan on doing something fun with people we enjoy after we accomplish
a task. Also, knowing that we will need to stop working at a certain time can help
us focus.

Dedicating some
time to something entirely different – i.e. gardening, athletics, a pet, ceramics,
reading books for fun, anything else – allows us to relativize the graduate
school process: while important, it is NOT the only thing that matters nor the
only thing that defines us.

Productive procrastination, within
reason

If we really need
to delay a task, we try to make that time productive (while recognizing that
some unproductive time is also important). Collaborating on another research
paper is a good option since it will likely get a paper out and it might be
more fun than our own thesis work (the novelty factor). We like to read books
that have nothing to do with our work since they might give us new ideas
nonetheless. There can be benefits to collaborating with people because we find
them interesting rather than because it aligns with our research. These
‘productive’ procrastination tactics might deter from your own work but might
pave the way for new pathways post PhD. Also, it beats staring at a blank
computer screen, facebooking, making and drinking tons of coffee and tea and
watching TV compulsively.

There’s a world of
options outside of the ivory tower and grad school’s one of many paths. We’re
privileged to be in grad school, even if it doesn’t always feel like a
privilege.It’s healthy to remember that
this path isn’t for everyone and we’re free to leave if we’re not sufficiently
satisfied.

Check out

We take regular
breaks and sometimes, we take a big break. We recommend baths and saunas. Time
far away, physically and mentally, can help.

During our check
out times, we really check out. We don’t take our work with us but
rather leave behind the academic books, laptops and the To-Do lists. Bringing
work to the beach, a week-end retreat and countless other places makes the time
away less restorative and we tend not to get much work done anyways. It can be
hard to let go of constant thoughts of “I should be writing” but that low-level
self-imposed anxiety wears us down. We’re more efficient when we take the time
to fully check out of work.

PhD comics: reminding us we’re not alone since 1997.

If you need just a wee break, check out PhD comics to remind yourself that you’re not alone in the ups and downs of grad school!

All things
considered, the grad student lifestyle has a lot of perks (as long as you’re
okay with being rich in ideas and relatively poor compared to peers who landed
professional jobs). Turning academic guilt into feelings of gratefulness for
the flexible lifestyle and ability to spend our days learning can help.

Living according to one’s intrinsic
values - the extra challenge of building a sustainable world

Doing a PhD in an
interdisciplinary field that aims to solve problems (i.e. sustainability,
development etc.) can be extra challenging because 1) People that entered such
fields usually want to help the world
in some way and a PhD can, at times, seem like a highly ineffective way of contributing
towards solutions; and 2) We need to understand and integrate several fields of
thought, without having well-defined disciplinary standards, which can increase
feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. On the bright side, it gives us the
opportunity to be exposed to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world, which
can be empowering.

Embrace the Game

Grad school, like
much of life, is a bit of a game. It’s been harder than we anticipated to feel
competent and have fun at this game, but it’s taught us about our strengths,
limitations and what we need to thrive.

Naomi Klein wrote “building a livable world isn't rocket science; it's
far more complex than that." Part of embracing this complexity and
creating a satisfying graduate school process is realizing that we can’t do
everything at the same time. Becoming a more informed, engaged and
compassionate scientist, person, and citizen is part of the solution.

How I feel after writing that last part.

We circle back
with a cheesy space metaphor: rocket ships work because they carry everything
they need with them. They don’t rely on external forces. But if one of their
essential parts breaks down, the mission is compromised. Long term balance is just
like this. We pursue graduate degrees so that we can make lasting and tangible
contributions. You know where this is going… we won’t make it to the long term
if we don’t attend to all our rocket ships’ needs.

When
we reach the end of this graduate school expedition, we want to look back on it
as time well spent. Even though it will not be a giant leap for humanity—a
realization most students reach a few years into a PhD program—we want it to
be a personal leap of success, a source of pride based on working hard to
contribute to making the world a little better.

Chris Hadfield rocks the space science

We want our grad school journeys
to avoid the disastrous fate of the Apollo 13 expedition and be more like Chris
Hadfield’s stint at the International Space Station which we see as a mix of
cool science, amazing people (come-on, who else but Hadfield can pull off that
moustache with so much style?!) and brain expanding experiences, spiced with
some nerd-fun and good tunes (e.g., Space Oddity). Such a mix would make the requisite hard work feel
worthwhile.

Making
our graduate school experiences emulate the most rad Canadian astronaut’s
experience in space is much easier said than done. This educational process has
required substantially more endurance, courage, tenacity and pain tolerance
than we ever anticipated. You think running a marathon is tough? Well, try
doing a PhD. It’s kind of like a marathon that tends to last for, let’s be
honest, 6 years or more. A PhD tests your emotional stability, sanity, sense of
purpose and self-worth. A PhD inevitably becomes extremely personal. Doing it
gets at the very core of who you are and what motivates (and de-motivates) you.

Running up and down mountains has proven far more straightforward and often more satisfying than working on our dissertations

The grad student lifestyle can be
awesome because we have a remarkable amount of autonomy, freedom and
flexibility to pursue answers to the questions we choose. We basically live the
intellectual’s dream, get (under)paid to pursue topics we care about, have no
real boss to tell us what to do, operate mostly on our own terms and on our own
time, while surrounded by other similarly nerdy people.

But
there are darker dimensions to this PhD experience. Nearly all graduate students
flounder and suffer to varying extents and lengths of time. Sooner or later the
grad student life gets to most of us. We’ve been startled when we have
conversations with other graduate students whom we perceive as extremely
competent. These brilliant students, however, often struggle with self-doubt,
anxiety, loneliness and depression. This rather prevalent dark underbelly of
graduate school is too often not openly discussed.

Grad
student life is more of a roller coaster than we imagined. Most of us have a
few shining moments of glory when we feel smarter than we’ve ever been before.
But this is tempered with stretches of feeling like we know nothing or at least
we are overwhelmed with all that we now realize we don’t know.

If
you’re lucky and strategic, you might feel like you are changing the world with
your work. More frequently, you will likely feel like your dissertation will
never end, like filling a bucket that has a hole at the bottom with water. Sometimes
you feel connected to many inspiring people who care and think about the same
things as you do. Then there are the days when you’re convinced you’re alone in
this world of your little PhD rabbit hole.

What
makes a graduate school fun is also what makes it so challenging. The fact that
we can work on whatever we want means that our identities gets wrapped up in our
work. We perceive our dissertations as a signifier of our value. It’s too easy
to think that if my research is not good, then I'm not good.

The
freedom and flexibility we have also means that our productivity is our own
responsibility. If we procrastinate, we have to take personal responsibility
for it. Our academic supervisors tend not to breathe down our necks. They train
us, their students, to be independent. Our advisers tend to be exceptionally
academically intelligent, insightful and sometimes harsh with their critique
and feedback. They are always busy, usually really
busy (there’s intense selection processes relevant to who gets hired as tenure
track and tenured profs these days. See this story with the following excerpt:"Peter Higgs, who won the Nobel prize for his work on the Higgs boson, recently said that
the imperative to publish all the time would disqualify him from contemporary
academe.")

In contrast
to most work environments, professors tend not to demand greater output and
faster deliverables. Motivation to complete a graduate degree must generally
come from largely within ourselves. We have to motivate ourselves to do work
that can be boring and repetitive, like data cleaning or transcribing. Add to
this the fact that much of what we do is like searching for a needle in a
haystack often without even knowing what we're looking for. We've gone down intellectual rabbit holes (wormholes would be way cooler) involving weeks and
perhaps months of reading up on theories and topics that end up not being part
of our theses or dissertations. These tangents tend to leave us with little to
show for large blocks of time and a feeling that we're not useful.

Check out his post on the Beaty Biodiversity Museum's blog, which explains more about his organization, his expeditions -- including destinations like the Great Bear Rainforest and Haidi Gwaii -- and how this role merges his passion for research, natural history, and education as part of a larger mission to raise awareness and protect marine ecosystems.

KC: How did two amicable colleagues resort to raised
voices discussing sustainability and the imaginary? In part 1 of
this exchange between Sustainability thinker John Robinson and myself (Kai Chan), John introduced a fascinating new research
project/exhibit on sustainability as an imaginary problem, and I responded with
concerns that science was not parallel to religion. In parts two, three, four, and fivewe debated the
extent to which science is religious, ideological, or morally prescriptive, and
decided finally that what John was calling 'science' was actually better termed
'materialist metaphysics'. At that point, I think we both felt a happy
near-complete resolution. Little did we realize what tension lay ahead....

KC: Walking briskly out of a faculty meeting where we met with President Arvind Gupta as a department, John and I commented on the weekend's extended email
exchange. Just like what students seem to imagine of university professors,
John joked, spending weekends writing long philosophical emails to one another.
I laughed and noted just how rare it is for me to email about work at all on
the weekend.

As we reached the base of the stairs in the beautiful new Earth Sciences
Building, in the heart of the wide-open lobby (five floors of open space
above), we stumbled upon one remaining point of difference. If I remember
correctly, John noted that he was glad that the substitution of 'materialist
metaphysics' for 'science' allowed me to see that this philosophical
perspective on which science is founded is indeed prescriptive.

"What do you mean?? Of course it's prescriptive!!" John
exclaimed, surely exhausted by the five rounds of emails and the notion that
they did not--after all--come to resolution.

And that was the beginning of a tense few minutes. While we reconciled
what we meant by 'prescriptive', I also weighed in on my concerns about how the
planned Sustainability in an Imaginary World exhibit might send
dangerous signals about the nature of science--even if the choice presented to
participants was between 'Religion', 'Literature', and 'Materialist
Metaphysics' (but noted as the foundation for science). (Note: partly as a
result of our exchange, the names of two of the three perspectives have been
changed, as discussed in John’s concluding remarks below). After agreeing that
by one interpretation, the latter is certainly prescriptive (more on this
below), I expressed my worry that other folks would interpret the choice as I
did (clearly making logical leaps based on my sample size of one), and John
pointed out appropriately that I'm not the first person they had explained the
planned exhibit to, but the only one to have such a reaction (I
interpreted John's body language as seeing my reaction to be clearly mistaken). At that point, it
seemed clear that John no longer believed me that I was not deeply immersed in
the materialist metaphysics perspective; I was just trying to play devil's
advocate.

And that's when steam rose from my collar, and our voices escalated as
we gesticulated, to the point that I glanced up and wondered whether President
Gupta and Dean of Science Simon Peacock were watching this animated display of
academic zeal. A friend on sabbatical, David Earn, punctured the tension. With
hugely self-conscious awkwardness, I said hi and apologized that I really could
not leave this conversation at that juncture.

Looking back on this moment, it's all so laughable. And fortunately,
John and I both realized that and reflected on which implicit assumptions
brought us to that bizarrely escalated moment.

As a practicing scientist, I certainly see the great value in the
scientific perspective, which I see as accepting the materialist metaphysics
position temporarily for the sake of applying the scientific method to better
understand cause and effect. I agree that we cannot know 'truth', but that
doesn't trouble me much. Science helps us get closer to making sense of how much
of the world appears to operate, and that's good enough for me 99.9% of the
time.

As someone who studied and publishes in philosophy, I was shocked to
find myself so strongly at odds on these issues with a humanities scholar. But
my primary philosophy education was logic and ethics, much more than
epistemology and metaphysics. So for me, 'prescriptive' meant a complete and
logical moral argument about what one should do.

John's training is obviously much broader across the humanities, and
from his perspective, worldviews are prescriptive in the sense that they colour
what we view as right. Of course they do! I argued that the scientific method
(including peer review) is an imperfect but intentional and somewhat effective
tool for critiquing such implicit assumptions, and for rebuking inappropriately
value-laden conclusions. John held the position that the scientific community
openly embraced deeply consequential value-laden assumptions.

Thinking then about John's own background, I realized that since we were
using 'science' inclusively (both natural and social), when John said 'science'
he also imagined economics. (I remembered that John has often critiqued the
implicit assumptions in economics, and John was Tom
Green's
supervisor for an excellent PhD dissertation on the limitations of undergraduate
teaching in economics.) Much more than chemistry, physics, and biology, I
certainly agree that economics makes broad and substantial assumptions about
value, which are clearly prescriptive in the sense John intends. Think of the
distorting power of GDP measures and economic growth in discussions about the
health of a nation. Everyone can agree to beat up on economics, can't we? ;)

Twice (with 'prescriptive' and 'science'), we used the same words in
substantially different ways without knowing it. Ah, the challenges of
interdisciplinarity!

Reflecting on the Sustainability in an Imaginary World Project, my concern lingers that it may inadvertently result in further
confusion about the role and utility of science. In this time when science is
so badly being distorted, maligned, and ignored in official circles in both
Canada and the USA, I dread anything that lends credence to the arguments of
those anti-science interests. Perhaps irrationally, I fear climate skeptics
using this exhibit--which seeks to make sustainability more imaginary (with
less emphasis on fact)--to justify ignoring climate science, choosing instead
to 'imagine' what human actions will incur for our climate.

That said, the planned exhibit also makes superb points, so I'm looking
forward to experiencing it!

And now, from Dr. Robinson

JR: I felt
exactly the same as Kai: an apparent happy resolution to our disagreements in
our email exchanges seemed to dissolve into thin air and here we were at
loggerheads again. As he so well describes, we discovered, yet again, that
different implicit assumptions each of us had about both our own position and
that of each other, were in play. I think our experience in this exchange reinforces
the argument that deep forms of interdisciplinarity require actual immersion in
each other’s world: there is no substitute for lots of time spent together in
discussion.

Directly as a result of our
exchange, I have decided that we need to change the name of the three
perspectives/worlds we are exploring in the Sustainability in an Imaginary
World project. They are derived from Richard Rorty’s brilliant article
“Philosophy as a Transitional Genre” (in Philosophy as Cultural Politics,
Philosophical Papers, Vol 4, Cambridge University Press, 2007), where he says
that “that the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance,
progressed through three stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God,
then from philosophy, and now from literature.” He goes on to say that the last
gasp of the philosophical stage is a belief in materialist metaphysics. Rorty
describes it this way: “This was the attempt to put natural science in the
place of both religion and Socratic reflection, to see empirical inquiry as
providing exactly what Socrates thought it could never give us—redemptive
truth.”

In my exchanges with Kai, I used the
shorthand of “religious, scientific and literary perspectives/worlds” to
describe the three positions. Based on our discussion, I think it would be
better to say “spiritual, materialist, and literary perspectives/worlds”. That
allows a separation in principle between science and materialism. Many
scientists are of course deeply religious, though I would guess that
materialist metaphysics is by far the most prevalent philosophical position of
most practicing scientists. This change of language also allows us to include,
in the spiritual category, those that see redemptive truth in the non-material
realm, but perhaps don’t belong to any organized religion.

I think this issue underlies the
question of the role and status of scientific understanding. Kai says “Science
helps us get closer to making sense of how much of the world appears to operate”,
and I agree with that. But, from a literary perspective point of view, much turns
on what we mean when we use terms like “world” (not to mention “making sense”
and “appears”). Does this world exist independent of our beliefs, values and
understandings? Both the spiritual and materialist perspectives/world would say
that it does. We may have only partial understanding of that world (we see
through a glass darkly in one famous religious statement) but it exists
independently of us. The literary perspective/world challenges this view. In
Rorty’s language “we only have each other”. There is no external reality or
divine plan that exists outside us.

I hope this helps to explain why I
have used the awkward term “perceptive/world” in this brief comment. In both the
spiritual and materialist worlds, these questions are matters of perspective or
world-view: a view we have of the world, which exists independently of those
views. But in the literary world, it is not a question of a perspective but of
the nature of the world itself. Put in somewhat literary terms, the world is
fictional all the way down.

The purpose of the Sustainability in
an Imaginary World project is to explore the question of whether the difference
among these three perspectives is important for addressing sustainability
concerns. In particular, what would it mean for sustainability to adopt a
literary view (the other two are much better understood, and practiced, I
think). What worlds do these three approaches give rise to?

From this point of view, it is not
just economics that is prescriptive (though I certainly agree with Kai that economics
is prescriptive in particular ways that physical and natural science are not).
But science itself, as a way of thinking, almost always posits the existence of
an external world that exists, and operates, independently of human existence. (Indeed,
explicitly championing that point is a central argument of much of
environmental science. We have to escape from anthropocentrism, it is claimed,
and recognize the existence, and value, of a world independent of us if we are
to save or preserve nature.) It is in this ontological sense that the
materialist perspective/world is prescriptive, and such ontological
prescriptions have very large practical consequences. I think Kai and I agree
on this. [KC: Indeed, we do!]

As Kai says, he comes at these
questions from the point of view of logic and ethics, while I am more focussed
on epistemological and metaphysical questions. As a result I have a lot of
trouble with the fact-value distinction, and therefore with the view that
prescription applies only to a moral realm.

As to Kai’s final point about the Sustainability
in an Imaginary World project potentially undermining public perceptions
of science, I prefer to think
that it instead offers at least the possibility of suggesting a different kind
of science than is usually provided. As Rorty is at pains to argue, the
literary approach does not deny that science is the best social process we currently
have for predicting phenomena (as opposed for example to saying objectively
true things about some reality that exists external to us). But science is
itself of course a human endeavor (as a century or so of science studies has
exhaustively shown). The challenge here is to articulate what a literary
approach to science would mean. My suspicion is that it would be both very
different from, and perhaps more useful for sustainability, (and maybe even
less “distorted, maligned, and ignored”, despite having “less emphasis on
fact”) than the kind of science that is usually on offer. But even to raise
this question means trying to articulate what this different approach might
look like, and how it compares to more conventional approaches. That is a major
purpose of the Sustainability in an Imaginary World project.